[Bug 241219] x11-wm/xfce4-wm: FreeBSD Update Causes XFCE Screensavers Causes User Forced Reboots

[bugzilla-noreply at freebsd.org]

https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=241219

--- Comment #6 from Guido Falsi <madpilot at FreeBSD.org> ---
(In reply to John from comment #4)

> This bug is not the same as bug #240804.

I did not say it is the same, only that it looks very similar.

There is clearly some language barrier between me and you. I'm not a native
English speaker, so sometimes I could misunderstand you or not express myself
clearly in English. Please try to give me some leeway.

I'm trying to help you, but we need to cooperate, I'm not saying the bug does
not exist and never thought it, so no need to be defensive about this.

> Clearly there is a bug.  Clearly something is wrong.  The bug of what
> is wrong and why bug occurred after the packages updated, installed
> and reinstalled from the 12 October 2019 14:45+000 FreeBSD Upgrade is
> the bug at hand.

I agree there is something broken after the upgrade. But I don't know what and
the information you provided is not shedding light for me.

I use the term "issue" and "something broken" to generally describe unexpected
ot unwanted behaviour.

The word bug, to me, means a programming error in some software, in the source
code. For reasons I will explain shortly while we are evidently seeing an
unwanted behaviour I cannot be sure such a behaviour is caused by a software
bug. I need you to perform some tests to try to understand the cause of this
unwanted behaviour.

I have tried to reproduce the issue on my system but I could not.

This reply of yours gave me new information I could not gather from your
previous message, that the issue appears with any of the two screensavers in
isolation, this makes it even more improbable that the problem is caused by a
single bug. it's quite improbable for the same programming error causing the
same broken behaviour to be present in two separate projects developed by
different people.

Now, about the tests, I asked you to reinstall a bunch of software because my
previous experience with FreeBSD ports (and also with software on other OSes)
has shown that in the life of a system with the periodic updating of software,
which causes updating of libraries without updating the software depending on
them sometime misalignments happen. In some cases new library versions have
slight incompatibilities or internal structures change that software
inappropriately access directly or other such things.

When this happens strange problems show up which are difficult to diagnose and
are not really bugs but problems which show up on specific PCs and nowhere else
and can only be solved by reinstalling the right piece of software, but that's
not easy to guess.

You issue looks to me like a possible case of misalignment brought by
incremental updates with time, so I'm kindly asking you, as a test, to try
reinstalling the libraries on which xscreensaver an xfce4-screensaver depend on
and see if the problem just goes away.

(In reply to John from comment #5)


While the specific output from ps I asked for may not be needed, it was a very
fast thing to do, as I said I have no idea what is causing your issue, I've not
been able to reproduce it, I'm trying to gather information, and since I'm not
infallible I also can make mistakes in the process.

Anyway, while I generally agree that testing should start from known reference
point unluckily debugging issues on a live system is not pure science, and it's
quite difficult to get a known reference point.

That's also why I'm asking you to try reinstalling some packages, to be sure we
are using a coherent set of libraries and binaries, because that could not be
the case on a system which has been getting incremental updates over time.

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